Vet's documentary honors fallen Marines

May 27, 2013
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Logan Stark, 26, of Greenville, Mich. with his dog Chloe, was a corporal U.S. Marine with three deployments, including one to Afghanistan for seven months. He is a senior at Michigan State University. / Regina H. Boone, Detroit Free Press

by Niraj Warikoo, Detroit Free Press

"I thought it was going to be easy, like video games, like a movie," Stark recalled. "It wasn't."

His first week there, 10 men in his battalion were killed.

"We took a lot of casualties," said Stark, 26, of East Lansing. "After that, you really had to come to grips with the fact that you might not be making it home."

Stark survived, but his haunting memories of what he experienced in Afghanistan stayed with him. They compelled him to make a 48-minute documentary as part of a class at Michigan State University, where he's now a student on the GI Bill. Released this month, it's titled, "For My 25," referring to the 25 Marines in his unit who died during his seven-month tour in Afghanistan. More than 200 other soldiers were wounded.

"We owe it to the 25 who didn't come home and every other warrior who has paid the ultimate sacrifice," Stark said during the documentary. "We owe it to them to keep their memory alive. ... We owe it to the mothers who never stop praying and to the fathers who buried their sons too early."

The film purposely doesn't touch on politics or the situation in Afghanistan, where almost 2,100 members of the U.S. military have died as part of Operation Enduring Freedom over the past 12 years. It instead keeps its focus on a group of young men in their 20s with the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines who forged bonds amid war. The documentary is a raw, honest look at what drives soldiers and keeps them going. For Stark and his friends, staying alive and looking out for each other are what motivate them. Having a sense of humor helps, too.

"What got us most through was our ability to laugh at the situation," said Matt Smith of Chicago, one of the Marines whom Stark fought with in Afghanistan. "You just make fun of the danger of it. That's how we pretty much got through it, like making a joke out of it and becoming a little cynical about the whole deployment."

Raised in Greenville, Mich., 30 minutes northeast of Grand Rapids, Stark joined the Marines at the age of 20 because "it was something I felt like I needed to do." The origins of his documentary started with a six-minute short that Stark made last year of fellow Marine Kevin Frame of California for a journalism class. Frame had a narrow escape when a bullet struck his helmet and ripped through part of it, but it didn't strike his head.

"That had such a strong impact on me," said Smith in the documentary of Frame's brush with death. After that, "I just wanted to go shoot everything I (expletive) saw."

In the documentary, Frame said: "That was the day I was completely changed. It was a fight every single day just to make sure you get out of there" alive.

During a multimedia writing class this year, Stark decided to extend the six-minute clip into a look at others in his battalion. It also takes a look at the struggles they faced after returning to civilian life; many of them have symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.

The documentary is "helping people talk about what's hard," said Bump Halbritter, an MSU associate professor of writing, rhetoric and American culture, who teaches the class in which Stark made the film. "It's a way for veterans and Marines to share this with people in their lives."

In Afghanistan, "the first three months were (expletive) miserable," Frame said. "It took an emotional toll on us. It was kind of demoralizing."

They were based in Sangin, a place in Afghanistan where the Taliban used to grow poppies to make money off the drug opium. The Marines often came under heavy fire as they battled with them to maintain control of the area.

"We were so short on bodies that we were begging the Marine Corps to send us Marines to help us," said Jordan Laird of Idaho in the documentary.

But Laird and others didn't let the pressure break their will.

"We're not going to let the enemy see we're taken down easily," Laird said. "We're going to let them know America is here, and we're going to chew bubble gum and kick ass."

In one part of the documentary, Laird shows off his M40 sniper rifle.

"This is what I got my first two kills on," he says. "They were running from left to right. ... I didn't even know (initially) I hit them. It was pretty funny."

After returning to the U.S., Laird worked as a sales representative for T-Mobile, finding it hard to adjust. Others could find only minimum-wage jobs, and some struggled to connect with families. And so they've relied on each other to get by.

"Those brothers will always mean a lot," Stark said. "That's a bond that will never go away."